Marissa Mayer’s confusing salary: She could get $60M for her first year

Yahoo revealed Marissa Mayer’s starting salary today, which may top out at around $60 million in her first year at the media company.

Yahoo filed Marissa’s salary offer with the Securities and Exchange Commission today. She will earn a base salary of $1 million annually with a considerable amount of equity on top of that. Mayer had her first day at Yahoo on July 17, after leaving an executive position with Google, where she was the 20th employee.

There are number of estimates floating around about Mayer’s salary, mostly because of how confusing the wording is in these agreements. We’ll try to parse it for you:

Mayer will make the extra money from participating in Yahoo’s “executive incentive plan,” which provides equity awards based on performance goals. Given this program, Yahoo will provide Mayer with an extra 200 to 400 percent bonus of her annual salary pro-rated for 2012. The target equity award for people in the EIP is typically 200 percent of the annual salary.

She will also get $12 million annually in restricted stock units and in stock options, which will vest over the next two-and-a-half years.

Mayer will further get a one-time retention award of $30 million in cash and stock, which is basically just an incentive to stay for five years — the time it takes to vest.

On top of all of that, she will get $14 million in “make-whole” to make up for money she left un-vested at Google.